Load balancers are commonly used to distribute network traffic across multiple processing entities. Load balancers can be appliance-based and are traditionally developed using custom or purpose-built proprietary networking hardware (e.g. NPUs, ASICs, TCAMs, FPGAs, etc.). As the technology evolves and network and back-office functions are migrated over to the cloud, load balancers implemented as hardware appliances are exceedingly difficult and costly to scale. Although software based load balancers exist too, they typically do not enable performance comparable to hardware appliance implementations. Additionally, a load balancer may need to operate in a transparent mode where the load balancing functions are performed transparently or invisibly to clients and servers in the network. For example, when operating in the transparent mode, the load balancer may intercept network traffic at the network layer and source addresses in the traffic are not modified when the load balancer routes the traffic to a processing entity. Systems and methods are needed to implement a cloud based, hybrid virtual load balancer that may be deployed transparently.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical or similar elements. Additionally, generally, the left-most digit(s) of a reference number identifies the drawing in which the reference number first appears.